>> Okay welcome back everyone to our special live presentation for cloud and IT analytics for the hybrid cloud. I'm John Furrier, your host. We just had an interview with Peter Burris, keynote presenter. Our second one-on-one conversation is with our second keynote, Sudip Datta is the Vice President of Product Manager for CA Technologies. Sudip, great to see you. Great keynote. >> Good to see you. Thank you. >> A lot of information on your keynote so folks can check it out online and on demand, but I wanted to ask you, you mentioned evolving infrastructure, so it's the first thing that you kind of set the table with. What do you mean by that? >> Sure. So first of all, as I mentioned in my keynote, the infrastructure today is intimately connected with business operations and the user experience, right? So how is the infrastructure evolving and catering to this ongoing demand of app economy? Before we get there, let's define what infrastructure means to CA, right? Infrastructure is servers, storage, network. Could be running on prem, could be running on public cloud, right? So let's look at what's happening on each layer, right. In the server layer, we are seeing bi-directional, somewhat antithetical movement, right? One on the consolidation side of things and the other on expansion to multiple clouds, right? On the consolidation side of things, of course there are re-amps and now we see more and more containers getting adopted like I was looking at a survey. The container growth between 2016 and 2017 is more than 40%. So we are also hearing about serverless compute, stateless compute, and so on and so forth. So that's on the server side of things, right? Storage, we are hearing about object storage. Network is getting more and more abstracted with software defined networking, right? Another survey portrayed that between 2014 and 2020, the SDN market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 53% and that's huge. Huge. So the infrastructure is evolving, getting more dynamic, getting more abstract, right? And therefore there are challenges to monitoring and management. >> And you're seeing growth in Kubernetes just to throw a cherry on top of that conversation because that's orchestrating the apps which require programmable infrastructure. >> Absolutely. >> I want to just make a comment, I was just talking with Peter Burris and I want to highlight one of your pieces of your keynote that you mentioned that there's four pillars of modern analytics and monitoring and Peter and I were talking about the digital business requirement for a modern infrastructure and I was kind of teasing it out, I want to see where he wanted to go with it, I kind of put him on the spot, but I was saying hey, data's been a department, analytics has kind of been a department, but now it's kind of holistic. He kind of slapped me around, said "no no, it's still going to be a department." Although technically right, I was trying to say there's a bigger picture. >> Sudip: Sure. >> This is kind of a mindset shift. People are are re-imagining their analytics as a strategic asset just like data's becoming a strategic asset. My question is, if you don't monitor it, how do you even understand it? So you need these four pillars, and they are policy based configuration that's dynamic, unified monitoring, contextual intelligence, and collaboration integration. With the trend of the true private cloud report, you're starting to see the shift in labor from non-differentiated to differentiated. And those kind of four pillars as kind of a breeding ground for innovation. Are they connecting, do you see that connecting into this new IT role? >> Absolutely. As you rightly pointed out, the non-differentiated labor is being replaced by automation, by machine learning, by scripts, whatever it is. It's whole-scale automation. So that itself lends to the fact that there is a different shade of labor which is the value-added labor. So how does labor create value? And that's related to the four pillars that we talked about. How to manage these dynamic environments and glean data out of these environments to provide valuable insights and intelligence. We talked about contextual intelligence. So when it comes to contextual intelligence, IT can be intimately involved with the business to provide the IT context to the business or the business context to the IT and vice versa and add value to the business. Giving a specific example... In prior times, IT used to be reactive. When business runs out of, runs a camping, they run out of capacity and they say we need to add servers and they're rolling a server and so on and so forth. Now, of course the automation side of server provisioning has been taken care of. There are a lot of APIs out there, there are Amazon cloud formations and all that, but you still need a policy that is going to proactively detect, perform a what-if analysis that if there is a 2x ramp in business, there is going to be corresponding pressure on infrastructure and act proactively. That way, I can get to be the friend of business. It's not really acting after the fact, but acting proactively. >> I was talking with Umar Kahn, one of your colleagues yesterday. We talked about cars. I love Teslas 'cause it's a great example of innovation and you got old cars and you got Teslas. Really we're seeing kind of a move in IT where modern looks like the Tesla of IT where things are just different but work much better. So I got to ask you a question, Tesla's a great cool car, there's a lot of hype and buzz around it, but it's still got to drive, right? It's still got to be great. So you mentioned faults, fault detection and machine learning in your presentation, but IT ops still needs to run. And you got IOT Edge that Peter pointed out that needs to be figured out. So you got to figure out these new things and you got to run stuff, so you need the fault detection with the machine but you still got to be cool. Like the Tesla of IT. How are you guys becoming the Tesla of IT? >> Absolutely. I will touch upon a few points. First of all, as I mentioned right at the beginning, that data is important but we focused on the three Vs of data, which is velocity, volume and variety. But there is also the veracity of data and CA has been in the business of monitoring, capturing this data from various systems. From mobiles to mainframes, right? For the last few decades, right? So we have the true data, we are collecting the data, and now we are building a data analytics platform on which the data will be ingested and we will give insights. So that's going to be a big differentiator. The other is, we have all the tools from application management to infrastructure management tools, net ops tools, and we are connecting all of them to cover the entire digital chain. The reason is important, and I will highlight only one particular aspect of it. Network, the most neglected compliment in the infrastructure-- >> And the most important. Everyone complains about the network the most. >> Most important. Even when a kid plays a video game, it's an app. Most of us tend to forget that it's an app and the most important element in that app is the network. And we are in the business of network management so we are not only server and storage and app, we are also tying network management into this overall analytics platform. And within network management, it's tacit management, flow management. These are all important things because today's world, if your network betrays on you, then your user experience-- >> So I got to ask you, the products are in the company. And this is kind of important because most people who think about monitoring analytics would have kind of a different view based on what they're instrumenting. You're kind of talking about network and apps. You're kind of looking at the big picture. Are you tying that together? >> Absolutely. >> Can you explain how? >> Absolutely. So CA has been a market leader in application performance management and in network management and in server and cloud management. So we are tying all this together, the whole digital chain, as I said we are ingesting all the data into an open standard space, open source-based analytics platform, and we are collating the data so you can see what are the networks elements that preceded before a server got choked? Or before the application became inaccessible? We can tie it all together, all the units together, and perform assisted create and root cause analysis. >> Well I wanted to put you on the spot today because we are live, so I got to ask you as the VP of Product Management, what's your favorite product? Do you have a favorite child? (laughing) >> I mean, all of them are my favorite. >> There it is! Of course you can't pick a favorite, everyone's watching. >> Yeah, so yeah. >> As a parent you can't pick a favorite child. They're all good in their own way, right? >> They're all kind of horses for courses. Really, they do fabulous things. At the same time, we don't want the proliferation of tools. We are trying to rationalize tools like the net ops, the cloud ops and application performance management and tie them all together into our analytics platform. You can say like the analytics is my favorite word today because that's the new kid on the block but as I said, all of them are very very important. >> Well I always say, whoever could be the Tesla for IT is going to win it all. So with that, serious question, as VP of Product Management, do want to ask a serious question around that. What's your North Star? When you talk to your product teams, they're specking out products, they're talking to customers, and the engineers are building it out. What is the North Star? What is the ethos of CA these days? 'Cause you guys are pushing the envelope while maintaining that install base of customers. What is the North Star? What is the ethos? What's the guiding principles for CA Technologies? >> Absolutely. Customers, customers and customers, right? And the reason being, and I will give you... Of course, the user experience matters, but there is also an empirical reason. We are a market leader in the MSP space, for example. MSP and and just the space, and not only do we care about our customers but the customers of our customers as well. MSPs like ONE-NET, and Bespin Global, that you see is monitoring tools for managing their customers. So our allegiance goes all the way to our customers and their customers. So that's a guiding principle. But at the same time, we try to innovate beyond what our customers have been asking for. That's where the intuitive integration between application performance management, infrastructure management, network management, comes. And we want to be absolutely a leader in this end-to-end management. >> We talk with our WebOn team all the time and Peter and I talk about with Dave Alante all the time about how important IT operations are going to be right now because all the market research shows, Peter mentioned it, private cloud, true private cloud, hybrid cloud, massive growth area. Lot of opportunities for ops to really deliver value because the dev-ops momentum, because of the things like containers and Kubernetes, the programmable infrastructure has to be there. So I got to ask you the question, from a customer standpoint, and folks watching. What's the most important thing that your customers need to know when they start to re-think the architecture and ultimately make that 10 to 20 year investment in this new modern IT operations with CA? >> Sure. The first thing is, and I will re-visit the four pillars, right? That the dynamic, discovery, policy-based management is very very important because discovery, a lot of times we neglect discovery because it's always there. But the thing is, that's the starting point. That's the cradle where the overall monitoring takes birth. So that's the first point. The second is bring everything into, if not a single but minimal panes of glass. Maybe net ops has a tool and cloud ops has a tool and of course you have a tool for applications performance management. So those are the building blocks of monitoring. And then, overlay it with contextual intelligence and analytics. As I said, we are ingesting all the data, not only from CA tools, but using open APIs from other tools into our analytics framework and provide contextual intelligence. And last but not the least, collaboration and integration. We are integrating with frameworks such as Slack to provide collaboration between dev ops and IT ops, between storage admins and server admins, and so on and so forth, right? So those are the building blocks. So if you are thinking about what you are going to do in 10 years timeframe, first of all, hybrid cloud is a reality. So for managing the overall, entire spectrum of hybrid cloud, you need a tool that's unified, that can do dynamic policy-based management, that can provide intelligence, and that can encourage collaboration. >> Sudip, thank you so much for sharing this one-on-one conversation. For the folks watching, there's a great slide that outlines that operational intelligence. It was a beautiful eye candy, it's like an architecture slide, I was geekin' out on it. Check it out on the keynote on the on demand. Sudip, thank you so much for sharing your insight here on the future of modern analytics and monitoring strategies. This is a special presentation. One-on-one drill-down with keynote presenter Sudip Datta who is the Vice President of Product Management, part of the cloud and IT analytics digital business. We'll be right back with more one-on-one interviews after this short break.